Another officer of the Revolutionary era was the first owner, and for several years the actual occupant, of the lot immediately opposite Captain Cozens'. This was Captain Richard Lippincott, a native of New Jersey. A bold deed of his has found a record in all the histories of the period. The narrative gives us a glimpse of some of the painful scenes attendant on wars wherein near relatives and old friends come to be set in array one against the other.
On the 12th of April, 1782, Captain Lippincott, acting under the authority of the "Board of Associated Loyalists of New York," executed by hanging, on the heights near Middleton, Joshua Huddy, an officer in the revolutionary army, as an act of retaliation,—Huddy having summarily treated, in the same way, a relative of Captain Lippincott's, Philip White, surprised within the lines of the revolutionary force, while on a stolen visit of natural affection to his mother on Christmas Day.
On Huddy's breast was fastened a paper containing the following written notice, to be read by his co-revolutionists and friends when they should discover the body suspended in the air.—"We, the Refugees, having long with grief beheld the cruel murders of our brethren, and finding nothing but such measures carrying into execution, therefore determined not to suffer without taking vengeance for the numerous cruelties; and thus begin, having made use of Captain Huddy as the first object to present to your view; and further determine to hang man for man while there is a Refugee existing. Up goes Huddy for Philip White."
When the surrender of Capt. Lippincott was refused by the Royalist authorities, Washington ordered the execution of one officer of equal rank to be selected by lot out of the prisoners in his hands. The lot fell on Capt. Charles Asgill of the Guards, aged only nineteen. He was respited however until the issue of a court-martial, promised to be held on Capt. Lippincott, should be known. The court acquitted; and Capt. Asgill only narrowly escaped the fate of André, through prompt intervention on the part of the French Government. The French minister of State, the Count de Vergennes, to whom there had been time for Lady Asgill, the Captain's mother, to appeal—received directions to ask his release in the conjoint names of the King and Queen as "a tribute to humanity." Washington thought proper to accede to this request; but it was not until the following year, when the revolutionary struggle ended, that Asgill and Lippincott were set at liberty.
The former lived to succeed to his father's baronetcy and to become a General officer. Colonel O'Hara, of Toronto, remembered dining at a table where a General Sir Charles Asgill was pointed out to him as having been, during the American revolutionary war, for a year under sentence of death, condemned by General Washington to be hanged in the place of another person.
Capt. Lippincott received from the Crown three thousand acres in Upper Canada. He survived until the year 1826, when, aged 81, and after enjoying half-pay for a period of forty-three years, he expired at the house of his son-in-law in York, Colonel George Taylor Denison, who gave to his own eldest son, Richard Lippincott Denison, Captain Lippincott's name. (A few miles further on, namely, in North and East Gwillimbury, General Benedict Arnold, known among United States citizens as "the traitor," received a grant of five thousand acres.)
In connexion with Richmond Hill, which now partially covers the fronts of Captain Cozens' and Captain Lippincott's lots, we subjoin what Captain Bonnycastle said of the condition of Yonge Street hereabout in 1846, in his "Canada and the Canadians."
"Behold us at Richmond Hill," he exclaims, "having safely passed the Slough of Despond which the vaunted Yonge Street mud road presents between the celebrated hamlet of St. Albans and the aforesaid hill."
And again: "We reached Richmond Hill, seventeen miles from the Landing, at about 8 o'clock (he was moving southward) having made a better day's journey than is usually accomplished on a road which will be macadamized some fine day;—for the Board of Works," he proceeds to inform the reader, "have a Polish engineer hard at work surveying it; of course, no Canadian was to be found equal to this intricate piece of engineering; and I saw a variety of sticks stuck up; but what they meant I cannot guess at. I suppose they were going to grade it, which is the favourite American term."
The prejudices of the Englishman and Royal Engineer routinier here crop out. The Polish engineer, who was commencing operations on this subdivision of Yonge Street, was Mr. Casimir Stanislaus Gzowski, whose subsequent Canadian career renders it probable that in setting up "the variety of sticks," the meaning of which Capt. Bonnycastle does after all guess at, he understood his business. We are assured that this portion of Yonge Street was in fact conspicuous for the superior excellence of its finish.